Posted in biotech/medical, life extension
Practice results in better learning. Consider learning a musical instrument, for example: the more one practices, the better one will be able to learn to play. The same holds true for cognition and visual perception: with practice, a person can learn to see better—and this is the case for both healthy adults and patients who experience vision loss because of a traumatic brain injury or stroke.
The problem with learning, however, is that it often takes a lot of training. Finding the time can be especially difficult for patients with brain injuries who may, for instance, need to re-train their brains to learn to process visual cues.
But previous examination of the fungal “molecular clock,” using DNA-based methods, suggested that fungi may have evolved much earlier, between 760 million and 1.06 billion years ago. Extracted from Arctic Canadian shales, the newly discovered billion-year-old fossilized fungal spores and hyphae (long thin tubes) plug the gap in the fossil record and suggest that fungi may have occupied land well before plants.
The fungal fossils were found in rocks that were probably once part a shallow-water estuary. Such environments are typically great for fungi thanks to nutrient-rich waters and the build up of washed-up organic matter to feed on. The high salinity, high mineral and low oxygen content of these ancient coastal habitats also provided great conditions to perfectly preserve the tough chitin molecules embedded within fungal cell walls that otherwise would have decomposed.
While it’s not certain whether the newly-discovered ancient fungi actually lived within the estuary or were washed into the sediments from the land, they show many of the distinctive features you’d expect in modern terrestrial fungi. The germinating spores are clearly defined, as are the branching, thread-like tubes that help fungi explore their environment, named hyphae. Even the cell walls are distinctively fungal, being made up of two clear layers. In fact, if you didn’t know they were so old, you’d be hard-pressed to distinguish them from modern fungi.
Is aging a natural process that we simply have to accept as a fact of life?
A philosopher would say yes. Many doctors would also agree: that our cells eventually reach a point where they can no longer divide and either die or reach senescence, a retirement phase. Many scientists believe in the “Hayflick limit” — that no one can live past about 120 years old. These people might also say that aging — and dying — is a good thing; that the world is already overcrowded, that we already cannot handle our aging populations, that life must be finite to appreciate it, that all good things must come to an end.
But there’s a growing group of people — including gerontologists, biologists, engineers, and futurists—who believe that aging is a disease in itself, a disease that can be cured. That aging is not an immutable process, an inevitable “dying of the light,” to quote poet Dylan Thomas, but one we can “rage against” — through science, drugs, and lifestyle changes.
Ira Pastor, ideaXme longevity and aging ambassador and founder of Bioquark interviews Luba Greenwood J.D., Strategic Business Development and Corporate Ventures, Verily (Google Life Sciences), Board Member Mass Bio and Brooklyn ImmunoTherapeutics LLC.
Note: Following this interview, Verily announced a major set of collaborations with big pharma companies, further executing on its strategy in healthcare. Breaking news: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/20/alphabet-verily-doing-clinic…T4eLzIucEI
Ira Pastor comments:
In 2019 we have surpassed $7 trillion in total annual healthcare expenditures around the globe. As part of that $7 trillion, we’re now spending close to a $1 trillion a year on pharmaceutical products, $350 billion on medical devices, $200 billion on new Life Sciences R&D. Equally fascinating to note are the names of organizations becoming involved in this space in 2019.
From a U.S. centric perspective, 15 years ago when evaluting.
Healthcare Clinic, the first thing that would come to mind would be Kaiser Permanente; not Apple;
Medical Devices, Baxter or Medtronic; not Amazon would come to mind.
Pharmaceuticals, you would think Merck, Pfizer, Novartis, etc.; Not Google / Alphabet Inc. and their Calico longevity drug development initiatives.
Yet in the last couple years alone, these big tech companies have all made major strategic moves into health care, with the goal of using their Silicon Valley-honed skills (and major piles of cash) to try and disrupt the industry with various “moon shot” thinking, and the interests of these companies are really quite diverse from their core businesses.
Brain implants are the neural implants that directly connected to the brain. These implants electrically stimulate, block or record the signals from the brain. It enables communication between the brain and electronic devices, thus permitting brain activity to be modified, recorded or translated. This growth is primarily driven by Increased Neurological Disorders Like Alzheimer’s disease and Rise in Geriatric Population.
Advance Market Analytics recently introduced Brain Implants Market study with in-depth overview, describing about the Product / Industry Scope and elaborates market outlook and status to 2025. Brain Implants Market explores effective study on varied sections of Industry like opportunities, size, growth, technology, demand and trend of high leading players. It also provides market key statistics on the status of manufacturers, a valuable source of guidance, direction for companies and individuals interested in the industry.
Alongside our Ending Age-related Diseases 2019 annual conference, we are proud to announce the launch of a special pre-conference biotech workshop led by Dr. Kelsey Moody, CEO of Ichor Therapeutics, a successful and rapidly growing rejuvenation biotechnology company.
This joint event between the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation and Ichor Therapeutics is an essential workshop where you will learn about the fundamentals of launching and growing a successful biotechnology company with an emphasis on the nuances specific to the emerging rejuvenation biotechnology industry.
An intriguing new study from researchers at Stockholm University and Karolinska Institutet has described a mechanism by which virus particles can interact with proteins in biological fluids and become more infectious, while also accelerating the formation of plaques often associated with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
